Letting go
What is it you can't NOT keep?
Hi friends,
If you’re new here, hello! Head to my welcome post to see what goes on for both free and paid subscribers. You’ll also find everything you need to know about September’s Memoir in a Month with guest reader Ali Millar and October’s Writing for Better Mental and Physical Health short course, as well as this autumn’s Seasonal Sessions.
But before autumn, of course, there’s a whole summer to get ready for…
‘Families haunt each other. Generation to generation.’
Lisa Appignanesi
I’ve had to move the egg again.
The nine-year-old goose egg that lives in the fridge door, that is. It’s currently on the spoon rest beside the cooker while the plastic shelf it normally sits in dries. I’d wanted the fridge ticked off the list before I took leave of my jobs to do the gymnastics drop-off, but it was not to be.
There are a lot of jobs yet to be ticked off, but for this hour I’m writing in the cafe closest to my daughter’s club. If you’re looking for me between 3.30pm and Monday morning1 when we set off in a motorhome for a seven week tour of northern Europe, you’ll find me hair up with my noise-cancelling headphones on, half-dressed yet still clammy as I flit from room to room in trademark haphazard (but arguably more effective) cleaning/tidying style.
It will all get done.
We will leave the house in some sort of order for the pet sitters.
We will have the van fully loaded.
We will not fall out2 (because mainland Europe has shops).
But as I sit here, it’s not big stuff that’s on my mind. It’s the egg. Because it’s vulnerable, out there on the surface, not yet back in its cold bed. Is it possible that in my short absence, it’ll roll off the spoon rest onto the countertop and then smash on the floor? 48 hours before the longest trip of my life, it fucking better not. Come to mention it, will it survive seven weeks without me?
If you don’t know about the egg, then listen to this episode of my memoir, Held in Mind. This was the chunk of the book that won the John Byrne Award last year, and here I am with it, all happy in my therapy room installation at Summerhall on the solstice last year.
I know I’m not alone in placing irrational significance on the strangest of objects. Not the only one who experiences swells of disproportionate panic at the thought of the consequent tragedies that would no doubt unfold if anything bad happened to them. I recognise, though, that these thoughts are irrational. That they ramp up in frequency and become more vivid for me in times of transition. At least I can see it, even if I don’t do much to change my thought patterns. What can I not not take (my jewellery, my crystals)? What must be stowed away for safekeeping (the egg)? What can I leave out for the house sitters to use (even if it is a leap of faith to sanction the use of my favourite ceramics…)?
I don’t want to make too big a deal of it. We’re all a bit like this, to one degree or other. Especially if we’re talking about treasured mementos, heirlooms. As the unofficial curator and custodian of the family archive, I understand the value of it all and love nothing more than being able to lay my hands on the perfect photo or document for each episode of my memoir. Love being able to share some of what I’ve found with the cousins I grew up alongside at Auchengate, for it’s their story, too.
But what of the stuff that defies classification? That, like the egg, no one else would understand? When I get back home this afternoon, I’ll be wrapping it in fresh paper towels before I put it in a tub destined for the door cubby with ‘PLEASE DON’T OPEN’ Sharpied on it. I wonder if I’ll manage not to tell the house sitters all about it on Monday when I show them there’s a knack to opening the fridge door… Whether I’ll resist the urge, especially, to inform them that the egg remaining intact is a condition of our safe passage and return? That it remaining undisturbed means everyone and everything we hold dear will still be here when we get back?
N.B. Please don’t tell me in the comments what you think needs addressing in terms of my ongoing and increasingly complex relationship with the goose egg.
Instead, help me out with this one.
Because I’ve also been clearing out my bedside table for the house sitters and need to know what you do with it all. Your Mother’s Day cards. Your kids’ teeth, hidden away after late-night tooth fairy trips. Your dead dad’s eye mask that was the last thing he touched.
Do you keep these forever? Until you die and then they become someone else’s problem? Tim Lott wrote one of his Guardian Family columns on his four daughters’ baby teeth about a decade ago and I think about it more than I should.
So goose egg aside, I knew I’d be writing about this sort of thing for this week’s post and, a couple of days ago, remembered that when my dad died I’d copied something down about the stuff we end up with when someone dies. I found it quite easily (of course) in the journal I was keeping at the time. The quote I’ve pulled at the top had felt important enough for me to write down, and now I want to read more of Appignanesi’s words on this. On the concept she explores in her book – Everyday Madness: On Grief, Anger, Loss and Love – of ‘problematic objects’ and how they haunt us, along with everything else the dead leave behind.
‘Problematic objects’ are not heirlooms. They are, instead, the unclassified flotsam that belonged to the dead that keep on bobbing to the surface, unbidden, long after the official clear out is done. They’re the things you just don’t know what to do with, and so you do nothing. They linger on in drawers, corners and boxes. You come across them and remember you still haven’t dealt with them. They still need to go, but… where? So you close the drawer and get on with your day.
For me, the problematic objects included the individually-wrapped bars of Pears soaps I cleared from my dad’s bathroom over two years ago that still rattle around in the boot of my car. They include the eye mask and the baby teeth, too, which I read as a version of my children that no longer exists. They’re definitely not disposable, so what can I do with them?
And, by extension, what of things that have always belonged to me? The version of me that no longer exists, bound up in the projects I recently found at my mum’s house? I imagined my kids might be interested in looking at them in advance of the big trip but – spoiler – they were not.
Where did that Lindsay go? I read these back and wonder if the nearly 30 years that separate us make me want to hold on to these problematic objects in case she becomes lost if they do. I wrote about this last week, of course. How we should be encouraging our ageing loved ones to consider conducting a death clear-out, and how challenging it can be:
The Carers' Cribsheet
What follows is the essential intel. The ‘What Now?’ of managing the difficult stuff in the face of others’ illness, decline, accident or death. I’ll try not to be too triggering…
Or maybe there’s an alternative reading. Perhaps it’s this holding on that makes me, me? The need to record, to preserve, to remember is the same now as it was in the mid-90s. Is my Substack just an extended class project of my own design?
The teeth, the eye mask and the projects have been stuffed in the big cupboard at the top of the stairs for now, and maybe seven weeks in a van without it all will sort me out. Let’s see. In the meantime, I’d love to hear about how you deal with your own ‘problematic objects’. What they mean to you. What they trigger in you when you come across them (or believe them lost) and why you hold on to them, if you do.
See you in the comments?
The next wee while…
I’m going to be writing to you from the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden and northern Germany between now and mid-August and I hope you’re up for following along. This summer-long trip is a first for our family and I want to use the Membership space to explore whatever that throws up for us, so there will be fewer free posts. You’d be so welcome to hop on into the Membership for this, my memoir episodes and my courses…
And did you know that you can pause a subscription for 1, 3 or 6 months rather than cancel? I’ve just done this with a few of mine while I’m not working over the summer and it’s a lovely way to take a breather then jump back in when you can.
Easy to do in Manage Subscription on your dashboard:
Lindsay x
With one notable exception: my band – Wall Sun Sun – plays TONIGHT to launch our album, ELK. GREAT timing! I’ll have a quick shower for the sake of others. You can read all about it here:
https://lindsayjohnstone.substack.com/p/connection-consistency-community
We will.
Yes, we write because we hoard. This is a related activity, memoir and hoarding. And, yes, my mind just skates over the task of tossing away things, because I can just get to it another day. But it’s, I’ve come to realize, about accepting the most difficult part of being human, the passage of time. And Loss associated. And maybe once we understand that as a task, as a goal, that acceptance, it will get easier? I’m a work in progress. But I do know my son doesn’t need to find his baby teeth after I’m gone. I found mine, of course I did. My mother kept everything, not just her artwork and letters from all those painters. She had, and defended, a collection of takeout menus from the previous century. The jar of sugar packets from various restaurants were travel souvenirs. (As we age, we get worse…)
I am so excited about your trip Lindsay and can’t wait to hear about it. I’m jealous too. What an amazing experience for your family. I too hold onto things and I have my children’s milk teeth. I can’t throw them away. I also have only two things of my father’s, two rings tucked away at the back of my wardrobe, and they are massive - he had very big fingers. I wonder sometimes if they are worth something, but every time I take them out and look at them I see and feel him and this feels important. My dad got rid of everything. He moved around so much that he dumped important things like cine films of us as children which I find unforgivable. Maybe that’s partly why I hold on to everything. I have stacks and stack of my kids drawing books from when they were at Steiner school and all they did was making wishy washy watercolour paintings (they are actually very beautiful). I guess I really value these things. I certainly value art of any kind